kestrell | Entries tagged with magic

Kes: For those unfamiliar with his work, Ronald Hutton is a British professor of history, magic, and folklore, who lectures and writes amazing books on witchcraft, paganism, holidays, and folk practices, among many other fascinating subjects. I recommend his books to anyone interested in the history of witchcraft and folklore. Thus, I was extremely pleased to discover the following Zoom lecture series on Eventbrite.

The Last Tuesday Society
Zoom Lecture Series on The Occult, Death, Art, Sex, Whales, Crows & Everything in Between with Speakers including Marina Warner, Ronald Hutton, Philip Hoare, Mark Cocker & Many More

You can also receive a discount on Zoom lectures and other goodies if you
become a Patreon member
https://www.patreon.com/theviktorwyndmuseum?fan_landing=true
which also entitles you to discounts to the museum and
Absinthe Bar
https://www.thelasttuesdaysociety.org/cocktail-bar/#menu
if you are ever in London.

Digital Events page
https://www.thelasttuesdaysociety.org/digital-events/zoom-lectures/

Professor Ronald Huttun
Fairy Tales
Tue, November 22, 2022, 7:30 PM – 9:00 PM GMT
Note: Eastern Daylight Time is five hours earlier than GMT.

The History of Christmas
This talk is designed to explain when and how our familiar midwinter customs developed, and why
DEC 20TH 2022

In the new year, Professor Hutton will be giving Zoom lectures on Robin Hood, the Holy Grail, and Goddesses of Sex & War. There are many Zoom lectures offered by this group, but here are a couple more just in the next couple of months which caught my interest:

Myrddin – the Welsh Merlin by Dr Mark Williams
We look at some early Welsh poems (one spoken by Myrddin to his pet piglet)
Nov 28th 2022 8:00 pm - 9:30 pm

The Krampus & The Old, Dark Christmas with Al Ridenour / Zoom lecture
Explore the authentic folklore, history and contemporary practices associated with the Krampus with Al Ridenour
DEC 21ST 2022

Some past lectures, including some by Professor Hutton, are available on the Watch On Demand page
https://www.thelasttuesdaysociety.org/digital-events/watch-on-demand/

There is a review of a new Labyrinth tarot deck at the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books website
https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2021/12/labyrinth-tarot-deck-and-guidebook-by-minerva-seigel-and-tomas-hijo/
and yes, it is a tarot deck based on *that* Labyrinth, the movie featuring David Bowie and his, as the reviewer refers to it, "his inappropriate pants." I still remember those pants, vividly, and I think they were perfectly appropriate.

Anyone else spend an hour trying to find the perfect face mask? Alexx helped me pick out a very tentacular green man mask. Now I'm trying to figure out what costume, complete with appropriate mask, I will be wearing for Halloween.

Here are three articles and an essay by Oscar Wilde that explore the facets of mask-wearing

The Truth of Masks: A Note on Illusion by Oscar Wilde
http://www.online-literature.com/wilde/1310/

3 Questions: Historian Emma Teng on Face Masks
https://news.mit.edu/2020/meanings-face-masks-emma-teng-0819

MIT: The Meanings of Masks
https://shass.mit.edu/news/news-2020-pandemic-meanings-masks-series

At the Heart of Dismal U.S. Coronavirus Response, A Fraught Relationsip with Masks Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/at-the-heart-of-dismal-us-coronavirus-response-a-fraught-relationship-with-masks/2020/07/28/f47eccd0-cde4-11ea-bc6a-6841b28d9093_story.html

Do you own the soundtrack to "The Wicker Man"?
Are you a sucker for any story with spooky trees in it?
Do you throw around phrases such as "liminal space" and "psychogeography"?
Are you drawn to books and movies about folklore, legends, and ancient rites?

Then, like me, folk horror may be your subgenre.

I was aware of the phrase, but didn't really examine it in detail until last week, when I read _We Don't Go Back: A Watcher's Guide to Folk Horror_ by Howard David Ingham (included with a Kindle Unlimited subscription).

The best place to begin familiarizing yourself with the subgenre is
Folkhorrorrevival.com
which includes
"From the Forest, Fields, Furrows, and Further: An Introduction" by Andy Paciorek
https://folkhorrorrevival.com/about/from-the-forests-fields-and-furrows-an-introduction-by-andy-paciorek/
and here is the Folk Horror Revival IMDB movie list
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls062558913/

Adam Scovell has written the definitive book on folk horror, _Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange_, in which he lists the four elements of folk horror:
landscape
isolation
skewed morals, and
a summoning/happening.
you can read many of his reviews and articles here
https://celluloidwickerman.com/other-writing-work/
including Where to begin with folk horror
https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/where-begin-folk-horror

Teller, of Penn and Teller, has been involved in studying the cognition of magic for decades, and my favorite academic on the subject is Barton Whaley, an MIT alum who became the father of "deception studies"
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-47827346

Yesterday I got a new tattoo: it's a vine of ivy leaves that curl around my right wrist. I feel very lucky that the artist who did the tattoo was Victor, at Good Faith Tattoo. He took my design idea of an ivy vine wrapping around my list and literally made it blossom out into something magical. Today the swelling went down a bit, though the actual tattoo design is still raised enough that I can braille it.

You can see picks of my tattoo, along with pics of Victor's mermaid art and links to Good Faith Tattoo, at Alexx's journal
http://alexxkay.dreamwidth.org/

Just popping my head up briefly to mention that I have finally joined the 21st century and gotten a smart phone. It's an LG Android, and I'm using OK Google and TalkBack with it, so I can do 21st sentury things like send text by voice. Also, it can do Google searches faster than I can open my browser and type.

I'm still getting used to being able to use natural language, but am adapting quite quickly to issuing orders such as "Play John Lee Hooker" and receiving instant gratification.

It's more like a familiar than a smart phone, so I have named it Pyewacket.
Thank you to Alexx, who spent a tortuous amount of time on his phone to get me the phone I wanted, and attempting to instruct me in the way of the magical gestures (I'm more an incantatory sort myself, so this was no small feat).

My most recent success: answering a call while simultaneously playing WWOZ, and not losing either process.

I recently read an excerpt of this autobiographical essay in a past issue of "Lapham's Quarterly," and went looking for the entire essay, which reminded me of the writings of one of my favorite authors, Walter de la Mare. It turned out to be, as far as I could tell, only available in a collection of Hesse's essays titled _Autobiographical Writings_, which has not been reprinted since 1972. As I don't see any way in which I could be depriving the author of royalties by sharing it, I have uploaded the entire essay to SendSpace so others could read it. Here is the link, though I haven't used SendSpace in awhile so tell me if I got it wrong
http://www.sendspace.com/file/2qdgbw

begin quote
Fortunately, like most children, I had learned what is most valuable, most indispensable for life before my school years began, taught by apple trees, by rain and sun, river and woods, bees and beetles, taught by the god Pan, taught by the dancing idol in my grandfather's treasure room. I knew my way around in the world, I associated fearlessly with animals and stars. I was at home in orchards and with fishes in the water, and I could already
sing a good number of songs. I could do magic too, a skill that I unfortunately soon forgot and had to relearn at a very advanced age--and I possessed all the legendary wisdom of childhood.
end of quote

From e "Magic Shows" issue of Lapham's Quarterly, here is a guy who sounds as if he should feature in his own horror movie, because this seems to be the earliest trope of the illusionist who really was aiming to perform real magic.
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/biography/stage-light.php?page=all

block quote start
For Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg..., art and occultism were fundamentally joined at the level of craft. Unwilling to conceive of his practice as anything other than inherently mystical, he had, since his earliest days as a student in Strasbourg, combined his studies in painting with alchemical research to such an extent that he credited alchemy with leading him to discover a new way of fixing and enhancing pigments that would become the central element of his noted facility with color. The language of color was an important part of alchemical study, and Loutherbourg made himself its master, filling his paintings with its imagery, illuminating his canvases with creative and destructive flames, the subtle arcana of the magic world he felt inhabited his art.
block quote end

he also threw one hell of a Christmas party for William Thomas Beckford, author of the gothic novel _Vathek_ and designer of his own personal gothic abbey, Fonthill Abbey. The description of the three days in which the guests wandered through a never-ending series of illusions, mysterious music, scents which drifted through the air before mysteriously dissapating, etc., kind of sounds like being trapped in Hill House, no matter how pleasant the visions were intended to be.

Someone on a list posted a question about the ending of this book, and I wanted to ask any of my friends who have read it what their thoughts are. My thoughts are posted beneath the cut.
( continued below cut )

_The Arch Conjurer of England: John Dee_
by Glyn Parry
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/book/history/9780300117196/the-arch-conjuror-of-england-john-dee

Hugo and the magic of film trickery
J Hoberman
guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/feb/24/hugo-martin-scorsese-oscars-georges-melies

block quote start
With Georges Méliès as its subject, Martin Scorsese's Hugo – up for 11 Oscars – is a film that gives meaning to the cliché 'the magic of the movies'

Should you stay up for the Oscars, here's a surefire way to be hammered by the end: pour yourself a drink each time you hear the word "magic", and you'll be watching the winner's tearful acceptance speech in an alcoholic haze.
Is there a phrase more hackneyed than "the magic of the movies"? From the moment of their invention at the end of the 19th century, motion pictures have been perceived as simultaneously hyper natural and supernatural.
block quote end